Need help badly with Hard Drive cooling system on laptop

Hey All,
I noticed that my fan was blowing like crazy recently.
I opened my laptop to clean the dust from the airvent and as I cleaned the fan system, i noticed something on the piece of the CPU that's supposed to touch the fan for cooling.
Some sort of hard black "dust" as you can see on this picture :
http://videoff7.free.fr/hdd2.jpg
(on the right of the "touching fan" part).
There was also some of it on the fan side, like you can see traces of it on this picture.
http://videoff7.free.fr/hdd1.jpg
My question is, do laptop CPU need " thermal grease " between the cpu and fan or is it just some dust that i removed?
Please let me know as fast as possible because I removed this black thing totally and both surfaces are now totally clean and I don't know if it could possibly harm the CPU because it's being less "cooled" now!
(or if on the other hand, it's supposed to be totally clean for better cooling)
Thanks A LOT.


TheShadowRunner

 

The black stuff looks like remnants of the thermal pad that the manufacturer put on.

And yes, you should put some thermal paste between the CPU and heatsink. It would be okay without thermal paste if the bare heatsink was making really good contact with the CPU, but it would still be cooled better with thermal paste to fill in microscopic gaps.

Also, depending on how thick the original thermal pad/grease was, the heatsink might not even make good contact with the CPU without the thermal pad/grease.

 

Thank you lazybum.
I was thinking that it's some remants of a thermal pad too; thanks for confirming.
I think it is making good contact for now but i don't want to take any chances so i'm going to put some "thermal paste" (it couldn't hurt anyway, could it?)
Could you recommand what "Thermal Paste" I should be looking for in my case?
Or where I can buy a "thermal pad"?
Thanks again a lot.
Regards,

TSR

 

Arctic Silver 5 would be the best.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835100007

You might also consider getting a cleaner to clean the core and the heatsink before applying any new thermal paste.

The black stuff surrounding the core is not the remanents of a thermal compound but a layer put on every Intel mobile cpu. I dont know the exact use of it but if you search the web for images of Intel cpu's, you will see the same black coating.

 

Thanks miner, i've just bought a tube of this "Arctic Silver 5".
Apparently i will need 99% pure alcohol to clean the CPU surface before applying it. Hopefully i will receive it fast.
In the meantime, I will lower my CPU speed.
Thanks for your support guys, very appreciated (and so fast! ^^)
Regards,

TSR